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Qais Akbar Omar (first name pronounced "Kice") is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers, which has been published in more than twenty languages, and the co-author of A Night in the Emperor’s Garden, which has been dramatized by BBC Radio. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Sunday Times, and The Globe and Mail, and he has published short stories in The Southern Review, AGNI, and elsewhere. In 2014–15 Omar was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University.

Omar was born in 1982 in Kabul, Afghanistan. He holds a BA in journalism from Kabul University. He studied business at Brandeis University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University.

In Afghanistan, Omar worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military. He also worked for the United Nations. He comes from a family of carpet traders, and he served as a textiles specialist for USAID and the Asian Development Bank, helping carpet weavers across Afghanistan.